Revenger (17 page)

‘In the back office,’ said Ajay. ‘Across the storeroom there’s a door with a glass panel. Through that’s the office. The box is in there. It’s connected to the computer. Why do you need it?’

Carver didn’t answer the question. He just asked, ‘What’s the password?’

Maninder paused.

‘It’s all right,’ said Carver. ‘I don’t want your money . . . or your porn.’

Ajay gave a tired smile. ‘It’s “prosperity”,’ he said. ‘Ironic, innit?’

‘At least it wasn’t “peace”.’ Carver saw the black torch lying on the floor in front of Ajay and Chrystal, picked it up and said, ‘Right, I’m going now. I can’t be certain it’s completely safe up top, so don’t move from here till the police find you.’ He nodded at Paula Miklosko. ‘Make sure she gets seen by a doctor as soon as possible. I made a mess of your shop. Sorry about that. About tonight . . . I wasn’t here. If anyone asks, you defended yourselves with a bit of help from a bloke called Snoopy. You were heroes. He was a hero. The people who attacked you were murderous filth. You’ll probably get medals. You deserve to. But I wasn’t here. Is that understood?’

They nodded at him wordlessly and Carver turned to go.

‘Excuse me,’ called out Maninder, ‘but you never even told us your name.’

‘I know,’ said Carver.

Maninder nodded. ‘Well, thank you, anyway. We owe you our lives.’

‘You’re welcome.’

He went back up the stairs, the torch in one hand, the shotgun in the other, and slipped through the damaged door to the storeroom. Inside it was deserted apart from a small group of the dead and dying strewn by the scorched hole where the door to the shop had once been. As the torch-beam swept the room, Carver heard a rustling sound and shone the light in its direction, catching a shadowy figure staggering, doubled-over in pain, as it fled through the back door. One of the blast-victims made a feeble attempt to lift a hand in supplication and gasped, ‘Help me.’ Carver knew there was absolutely nothing he could do. He turned the torch off, then stopped for a moment and listened for any other signs of
movement
or hostile action, but the only sounds to be heard were coughs, wheezes and gurgles coming from the supermarket, making it sound like a hospital ward filled with consumptives and lung-cancer patients. Carver would check it out in due course, but first there was work to be done.

Even without the torchlight he could see the outline of the office entrance. He slipped through it, closed the door behind him, and turned the torch back on to find little trace of the carnage elsewhere, just the usual paperwork of a small business. There were box-files on shelves; plastic trays filled with invoices and correspondence; more papers strewn chaotically across a desk; a mug containing half a dozen pens and pencils; and a Dell PC next to a black box whose facia was covered with buttons like a domestic satellite receiver. Carver pressed the ‘on’ button on the computer and was not entirely surprised to see that it worked. It struck him that the air-blast had worked a bit like a neutron bomb: killing human beings but leaving property largely intact.

Two minutes later the entire CCTV feed for the past twelve hours had been deleted. He sprayed the computer keyboard with screen-cleaner fluid from a pump-spray bottle standing next to the Dell, then wiped it down with his handkerchief. Carver looked up to establish the position of the door so that he could find it again in the dark. Then he turned off the torch and repeated the cleaning process.

He had one more use for the cleaner fluid, so he put it in his jacket pocket, and it was then that he realized the head cam was already there. Carver took the camera out. The ‘record’ light was on, a glaring red dot in the darkness. It must have been running all the while, capturing the sounds, if not the images, of the supermarket battle. What was more, the head cam’s owner had been wearing and presumably using it when Carver and Schultz had gone to rescue Paula Miklosko. So their faces would be on it, too. Carver’s immediate instinct was to go straight back to the computer and delete all the head cam’s video files, just as he’d done with the CCTV. Then he stopped. There was evidence
against
him on here, true, but there might also be evidence against other people, evidence he could use. He turned the camera off. For now, at any rate, its contents were staying put.

Carver, however, had to get going. And that meant doing something he’d been putting off for the few minutes he’d been in the office. He had to go back into the shop and see for himself the havoc that his homemade bomb had wreaked.

40

CARVER HAD BEEN
in bus-stations attacked by suicide bombers. He’d seen hospitals hit by air-raids, and the burned-out remnants of an Iraqi tank regiment, blown to smithereens on the road from Baghdad to Kuwait. But there was something uniquely hellish about this. The corpses lay thick on the supermarket floor, a gruesomely vile and pointless slaughter that resembled a circle of hell as the blue-grey gloom and deep-black shadows were pierced by the flickering light of the flames and the sulphurous orange glow of the street lamps outside.

It disgusted Carver that he had been reduced to doing this. It shamed him that he had had the perverted skill to wreak such havoc. It angered him, too, for what choice had he had? He and the others would have died otherwise, of that there was no doubt. And for what?

Carver had known men who had killed for vast profits, or out of political or religious conviction. There were no excuses or moral justifications for their acts, but he could at least follow the calculations of those who thought their ends were important enough to
justify
such violent means. He could understand how suicide bombers believed that their self-destruction was in a great and worthy cause, even if he disagreed with them. But what had these people died for? Free fucking groceries.

Something caught Carver’s eye – a movement by the window. He stepped back into the shadow and stood motionless and silent as the slight figure of a girl appeared at the far side of the crashed garbage truck, peered in and then hesitated, not daring to come any further. From the size of her Carver guessed she must be around eleven or twelve. There was no sound in the room beyond the hacking and burbling of the rioters’ breaths, the occasional pathetic attempt at a call for help, and the fearful weeping of the dying. Some of the bodies were moving. Others were holding out hands in desperate supplication. Carver hoped to God that the girl would not understand what she was looking at; that the meaning of it would somehow pass her by.

She said something, but her voice was very faint, and Carver could not make out what it was. She straightened herself up and tried again, more loudly this time. ‘Ricky?’ and then again, ‘Ricky! Are you there? Mum says you gotta come home. You got school tomorrow.’

There was no reply. The girl stood there uncertainly, not sure what to do next. Then a barely audible whimper came from somewhere at the back of the room, an expression of pain unrelated to anything she had said. The girl must have recognized the voice as her brother’s, for she cried out, ‘Ricky!’ Carver could hear the relief, but also the mounting terror. She had still not taken a single step further into the shop. ‘Come on, Ricky, come home . . . please! Mum’ll kill ya if you don’t.’

There was another moan: the same voice as before, from the same place. Then the girl sniffed and cried out, ‘I don’t understand . . . I don’t know what to do!’

Every professional instinct told Carver to ignore the child. What mattered now was to avoid detection. The last thing he should do was to make himself identifiable. But as a human being, as a man,
he
simply could not stand by and ignore the girl’s distress. He’d brought the shotgun with him, just in case that last cartridge was needed for self-defence. Now he switched the gun to his left hand, held it casually down by his side and stepped out of the gloom. The girl gave a little squeal of alarm as she saw him loom up in front of her.

‘Don’t worry,’ Carver said. ‘I won’t hurt you.’

She looked at him. ‘Who are you?’ she asked.

‘Go home and tell your mum she needs to call an ambulance. Your brother Ricky needs an ambulance. Soon as possible.’

‘Where is he? I want to see him!’

‘I don’t think that’s a good idea,’ Carver said. ‘Just go and get an ambulance. That’s what Ricky needs.’

She didn’t move.

‘Please, just go,’ Carver insisted. ‘I’ll look after your brother.’

‘Why? Are you a doctor?’

Carver said nothing. The girl was trying to decide what to do. There was nothing more he could say now to help her make up her mind. He got a feeling she was about to turn and go but then there was another cry from the same direction as the previous ones.

‘Ricky! I’m coming!’ the girl shouted. She took a pace or two into the shop but then stopped. The bodies carpeted the floor of the shop so thickly that it was impossible to pick a clear path through them. At least half were still alive, though the number of survivors was diminishing with every minute that passed. Carver sighed to himself and gave a shake of the head; he could not believe what he was about to do.

‘Here, I’ll help you,’ he said and held out his right hand to her. The girl took it and let him guide her through the carnage.

‘Watch out,’ he said, seeing her about to tread on a twitching, outstretched hand.

The girl said, ‘Sorry,’ as she kicked into another body, cutting the end of the word short as she realized the body was dead. He was close enough to see her eyes now, and the bows on the ribbons that
held
her braids in place, close enough to see the look on her face as she suddenly gasped, ‘Ricky . . .’

There in front of them, slumped on the floor with his back up against a shelf, was a teenage boy, no more than fourteen, wearing an Adidas tracksuit over a Chelsea shirt. His eyes were still open, filled with fear and incomprehension, and there were small bubbles of foaming blood at the corners of his mouth as his lungs fought against the liquid filling them from within. The girl sat down next to her brother, taking his hand in hers and leaning her head against his shoulder. ‘I’m here, Ricky,’ she said. ‘I’m here . . .’

The boy was going to die for sure. But as Carver stepped away from the two kids and began spraying screen-cleaner all over the Mossberg he realized that there was something he could do to put right some of the wrong that he had been forced to do here. This riot had not been a spontaneous event. Someone had planned it. They’d brought a man in to act as the commander on the ground – that scrawny, grey-haired guy with the unexpectedly upmarket accent – and Carver was forced to admit that his old friend Schultz must have played some kind of a role in it too. Schultz had known things were going to kick off in Netherton Street, but he’d thought they’d be safe in the pub. That was why he’d been so astonished to see the mob come streaming in through the door, and that was surely the meaning of his final words: ‘It wasn’t meant to be like this.’

Outside, Carver could hear the sound of people coming to investigate. A woman started screaming. He put the gun down on the floor, in among the bodies. If any of his prints were still recoverable, which he doubted, they’d take days or even weeks to process, and he’d be long gone. There was a baseball cap, lying on the floor, blown from a rioter’s head. Carver picked it up and jammed it on, pulling the peak down over his eyes. He grabbed a scarf that had got wedged into one of the display units, and wrapped it round his face.

As he straightened up, his mind turned back to the implications of what Schultz had said. The riot was meant to be controlled and
contained
. It was intended to remind the public of the lawlessness of modern Britain.

Carver knew exactly who would want to give them a reminder like that.

The question was: how could he prove it?

Then he looked out of the window and got his answer.

41

DONNY BAKUNIN HAD
given the order to the truck driver to smash into the supermarket and then stood in the middle of Netherton Street urging on his foot soldiers as they had run towards their target. Only when most of them had been past him had he joined the surging mass, and he had only just run by the side of the truck and up to the mangled remains of the security shutters when the bomb had gone off.

The force of the explosion had punched into him and flung him several feet back the way he’d come. He had landed on the road and skidded across the tarmac like a human skimming stone until he’d hit the front wheel of an abandoned car. He had been winded so badly that several terrifying airless seconds had passed before he’d been able to take his first rasping breath and drag some air down into his bruised and battered lungs.

His face was scorched. His glasses had been thrown from his face and his eyes were in any case so dazzled by the explosion that he was virtually blind. He could hear nothing beyond a tinnitus shriek because his eardrums had been shredded by the pressure-wave
passing
through him. His clothes were torn almost to shreds and his body was covered in small, deep incisions that were all now bleeding profusely. His spine, ribs, elbows, thighs and even the back of his head were scraped and bruised from his impacts with the ground and the car.

All in all, Donny Bakunin was a sorry, fucked-up mess of a man, but he was still alive, and though every breath was agony his lungs were just about functioning. He screwed up his eyes, trying to see through the bright white glare imprinted on his light-blasted retinas, and gradually, over a period of minutes, he was able to get a blurred, shortsighted picture of the devastation that had been wrought on the supermarket and the people in it. Looking around, he could just make out the shadowy outlines of local people, venturing out on to the street now that the riot appeared to have ended. He saw two men by the garbage truck trying to hold back a screaming woman, preventing her from entering the supermarket as she kicked and fought against them. Another man came up to him and leaned down with a worried expression on his face. Bakunin could just about make out his lips moving, but he had no idea what they were saying. He pointed at his ears and shook his head. The man nodded his understanding then reached down a hand to help Bakunin up.